Abandon Film

It's not often that I'll give up on a film. I'm the eternal Movie Optimist; I can almost always find something to like about even the worst films.
But sometimes a film will defeat me.

Kingdom of Heaven - 2005, Ridely Scott
I almost regret not sitting through this one, and one day I might try again because I didn't even make it as far as Edward Norton who I like a lot. I watched the first hour or so on the TV recently, I'm not even sure which version I was watching; the original (and derided) cinematic version or the supposedly much more coherent director's cut (good old Ridely and his director's cuts). It's too easy to blame Orlando Bloom for KOH, even if he is woefully miscast. I don't mean to knock the guy, but there is a definite place for Orlando in the Cinematic world, and the lead role in historical epics is not it. I think the reason I so disliked KOH was because I so adore Troy. Orlando's performance in Troy is awful (along with Eric Bana's) but the whole thing is just the right level of camp for it to work. KOH also has an ensemble cast of famous 'great' actors, but it takes itself very seriously. If you get a load of well respected British actors to grow beards and dress up like knights to deliver po faced performances, it had better be Shakespeare, else it could easily be rubbish.

I'm Not There - 2007, Todd Haynes
I can handle pretentious bullshit, sometimes I even like it, but four/five actors all playing 'Bob Dylan' with varying degrees of self satisfaction was too much. A bunch of famous actors sitting around talking out of their arses may actually be the best way to represent the life and works of Dylan, but it ain't half boring.

10,000 BC - 2008, Ronald Emmerich
It was a while ago that I watched/abandoned this one and I have almost no memory of it, which is a surprise because I normally have a good memory for film (in place of being able to remember useful things). Something to do with cavemen mumbling to each other about someone who was kidnapped, and maybe a dinosaur. The action sequences were very boring and very expensive looking. It must be a massive disappointment for a director (and his financial backers) to watch the sequences he so carefully storyboarded, shot, and CGI-ed to the max, only to realise that the final shot is desperately uninteresting. 'Oh no' they must cry, 'This is meant to be the good bit'.
Some of Ronald's early low budget West German sci-fi films look quite interesting though.

Rocket Science - 2007, Jeffery Blitz
Soulless Indie Comedy by the numbers.

The Zombie Diaries - 2006, Kevin Bates and Michael Bartlett
Stop getting the Zombie Apocalypse wrong!
I love zombie films and the whole Dawn of The Dead zombie scenario in general. In fact, I sometimes fantasise about the dead rising and society falling. I'd relish the zombie Apocalypse, I think I could make it. For this reason I hate it when characters in zombie films start screwing up. I enjoyed The Walking Dead series on FX recently, but I still get annoyed when they get angry and shout at each other. Stop making so much noise. Stop wasting ammo. How could you not notice that zombie slowly staggering toward you?...and so forth. The Zombie Diaries is full of such stuff, but there was something else that put me off. TZD is a low budget British film (something to be applauded and supported) made with (I assume) amateur actors. At least I hope they were amateurs because they were all awful. This is the problem I have with home grown super-low-budget film; bad British actors seem worse than bad actors from other countries because I'm so used to British accents that I can easily tell when someone is 'acting' because it sounds staged and insincere (like the actors on Hollyoaks). Bad acting in non domestic films doesn't seem so bad to me because it's unfamiliar and so doesn't seem so obviously like acting. I suppose a zombie film where everyone creeps around in silence and never loses their heads might not be much fun to watch though.

Afterschool

Afterschool - 2008, Antonio Campos

I often count myself lucky that I went to school before WEB 2.0

Can anyone remember what the hell they did online before Facebook, Youtube and Wikipedia? I have a vague memory of reading funny stories on poorly designed websites that my dial up connection could download without too much trouble, and trying to find a decent NBA news website.

Enough has been written about the internet and its effect on kids to fill a thousand blogs, so I’ll keep my observations brief:

I’m sure that if I was in year seven or eight at school today, I would be a huge Facebook bully. I’ve never experienced any aspect of cyber-bullying, but I think it would have appealed a lot to me as a youth. The internet seems to have created a two-tear system of bullying. Poor rough kids don’t have the internet so they bully kids at school. Nice middle class kids have the internet so they bully other kids online, sometimes they don’t even do it anonymously. I was a nice little boy at school, and my educational experience was a pleasant one, but if I had had the opportunity to live out a second life, to carry out online whatever petty adolescent vengeance I may have harboured, who knows how I might have turned out.

Rob, the central character in Afterschool, is a nice upper middle class boy who has become an internet voyeur. He doesn’t need to do any bullying; he is satisfied just to watch. He likes to watch violent porn and real videos of school kids fighting. The internet allows him to become withdrawn and detached without getting bored or feeling like he’s missing out on much.

The well-to-do mixed boarding school where Afterschool is set is populated with teenagers who appear not to really like each other, but this may just be Rob’s perception. Rob is a bit of an outcast but he’s not completely friendless, he still manages to pull a nice girl, but no one else he hang’s about with seem like they care for him much.

Whilst shooting some footage for a video arts class, Rob is the only witness to the drug induced death of two beautiful senior twins who are the most popular girls in school. Their death is caught on tape. The bulk of Afterschool follows Rob as his video project becomes a memorial to the girls, officially sanctioned by the staff.

The popularity of the twins and the way the staff at the school turned a blind eye to their drug use, and that of other pupils, is a subtle critique of the way glamour and any level of celebrity is seductive, even to those who should know better. Specifically in the way the staff put the reputation of the school above the wellbeing of the pupils.
Rob’s failing is that he is a voyeur, but this is no greater fault than of those who find glory by mere association with the popular twins.

The only character who seems to have a shred of sincerity is the school counsellor, but to begin with he seems creepier than the other members of staff because he’s so keen to talk to Rob about his thoughts. This reflects the modern notion that any adult who displays any concern about the wellbeing of a child should be treated with suspicion.

Reviews for Afterschool are very mixed. It’s a slow film, but it’s incredibly atmospheric. Very uneasy from beginning to end, it’s very well shot and directed; one of the best debut films I’ve seen. Scenes are often framed with the actors just out of shot and with an economy of camera movement that reflects Rob’s apparent detachment from the world, even when he is involved in a very serious situation. The young cast provide understated and believable performances.

The original cinematic cut of the film was 107 minutes long. Unfortunately the DVD version (the one available on LoveFilm at least) is 142 minutes long. The slow pace is therefore drawn out to a degree that makes parts of the film a tad boring. I enjoyed and recommend it, but I’d definitely prefer to watch the shorter version if I get the change to see it again.

Antonio Campos hasn't made any other films since. I hope he has something in the works though, as he’s clearly one to watch.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird

The Good, The Bad, The Weird – 2008, Kim Ji-woon


After seeing so many good South Korean films over the last few years I was disappointed with The Good, The Bad, The Weird. The films from the far east that are given international releases are normally very good (why bother releasing bad ones?) and since the turn of the century the South Korean film industry has caught up with the quality, if not the quantity, of Japanese and Chinese films being released in The West. The reason films from these countries are so popular internationally is because they are so different; ‘Oldboy’ and ‘Spring. Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring’ are like nothing else made in America or Europe.

Originality is their strongest asset, and this is why TGTBTW fails. As the title suggests, it’s basically a mash-up (or homage, or whatever) of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Set in the Wild East, specifically Manchuria circa 1930, it’s a story about bandits running around robbing trains, riding horses and having shootouts. The film itself is good and bad and weird in equal measure, it plays out thusly:

opening dialogue, train robbery, dialogue, shootout, dialogue, horse riding sequence, dialogue, shootout, dialogue, massive horse riding shootout, dialogue, final shoot out, end.

It’s relentless. This film is a victim of its own ambition. though it crosses genres, above all it’s a big budget action comedy, the South Korean equivalent of a Brett Ratner film perhaps, only with characters who are even more one-dimensional. To begin, the tone of the film suggests that all the characters are intentionally under written so they don’t get in the way of the fun and high jinks, but then after the frantic first hour , a couple of character defining scenes occur which only serve to remind the audience how little we care about them. The Good and The Bad are really The Wooden, no matter how stern their glances. This film really belongs to The Weird played by a dude called Song Kang-ho (who along with the guy who played Oldboy must be South Korea’s finest thespian). It’s clear his capability as a comic actor is far greater that anything this film provides.

So, avoid Korean comedy, but consume Korean horror and drama as though it were finest kimchi.

WALL-E

WALL-E – 2008, Andrew Stanton

WALL-E is timeless. It is timeless because the animation and the story will never become dated. Modern 3D animation when viewed in high definition looks incredible, particularly when done on the scale of WALL-E. The first big Pixar films; Toy Story and A Bugs Life were about our world viewed from the perspective of tiny little toys and insects. This world view translated very well into 3D animation because animators could create models of characters and landscapes and show them in perfect scale with each other at all times. The tiny/giant world Pixar created looked amazing, so amazing that Pixar seemed tentative to set a film in the ‘real world’. Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles take place in a world more like reality but they do not try to appear at all realistic, they are very cartoon like. WALL-E is set in our reality, it even has some live footage of humans in it, but the world has changed enough for it to still be a complete fantasy.

As awesome as this film and almost all of the other Pixar films are, they still seems to be following in the footsteps of Aardman for the slapstick and Myazaki for the ‘there’s a meaasage here’ stuff. WALL-E has been described as ‘dark and cynical’ with an environmental message, but it’s not exactly Princess Mononoke. Even if it wasn’t a direct inspiration, the social and political commentary in WALL-E is very similar to Belleville Rendezvous (aka The Triplets of Bellville). I suppose that WALL-E’s greatest achievement is to create a serious and relevant subtext to a kids film that viewers of all ages can understand.

I’d love to see Pixar make an ‘adult’ film, something along the lines of Ghost in the Shell...?

Hamlet 2

Hamlet 2 – 2008, Andrew Fleming

Hamlet 2 is a parody of a comedy. At least I hope it is. It takes many aspects of contemporary comedies and uses them to show how formulaic a lot of ‘independent’ comedy has become.

H2 is set in a small town in America, this in itself is supposed to be funny somehow). Kooky yet sincere characters live in a small community. They are eccentric but if they appear unbelievable, that doesn’t matter so long as everybody else behaves normally around them. The villain of the film is a bully who doesn’t understand the crazy main characters and tolerates them the least. Sound familiar?

Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Juno (2007, were all very successful. Napoleon is overrated but was very well received at the time because it was so original. Little Miss Sunshine hit the independent comedy nail right on the head, following in the footsteps of Sideways (2004). Juno (which isn’t as good or as bad a people say it is) inspired a generation of teenager girls to be smart arses, better than aspiring to be a WAG I suppose. Between 2004 and 2007 the ‘delightful independent comedy film’ template was created. A template that will last forever. Sometimes film makers get it right; Broken Flowers (2005), sometimes they get it wrong; Rocket Science (2007).

Hamlet 2 gets it the most wrong of all. It’s not necessarily the formula that’s wrong; like any comedy Hamlet 2 relies upon the jokes and the performances to make it funny, all of which fall short. The sad thing about Hamlet 2 is that the lead is played by Steve Coogan. His performance is very Cooganesque, but the character is not a Steve Coogan character. And he puts on a very annoying American accent.

Stop getting Coogan wrong!

Luckily I caught this film on TV so I didn’t waste a precious LoveFilm delivery.

‘This years Napoleon Dynamite’ urrrrgh.

Steven Seagal vs Gerard Butler

Kill Switch, 2008 - Jeff King
Law Abiding Citizen, 2009 - F. Gary Gray

It seems like a tenuous comparison, and it’s one that Mr Butler wouldn’t be too pleased about, but I recently watched the Seagal vehicle Kill Switch, shortly followed by the Gerard Butler / Jamie Foxx film Law Abiding Citizen. In this particular case Law Abiding Citizen is in a different league to Kill Switch in terms of quality, but both films are basically about a morally ambiguous badass getting revenge.

I have an unjustified soft spot for Seagal, due entirely to Under Siege. I really want to like every one of his straight to video efforts, and occasionally they aren’t complete shit (Belly of The Beast springs to mind) but sometimes they’re beyond awful, like Kill Switch. What upsets me most about Kill Switch is that they were trying harder than usual to make a ‘Steven Seagal’ film, so it’s shitiness seems deliberate.

But the fact still remains that because of Under Siege, Seagal will always be able to make movies.

Is it fair to say that because of 300, Gerard Butler will always be able to make movies? He’s been in wider range of films that Steve, all those romantic comedies and even the upcoming Shakespeare adaptation, but ultimately, will Gerard always fall back on playing the Angry Wronged Man?

Gerard Butler is Gerard Butler in Gerard Butler Film.

Law Abiding Citizen is a bit like The Life of David Gale, only more people blow up.

...

Is anyone else as obsessed with Jamie Foxx’s hairline as I am?